


burned out flames should never reignite

by youcouldmakealife



Series: throw up your fists, throw out your wits [8]
Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-11
Packaged: 2017-12-26 07:11:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/963079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youcouldmakealife/pseuds/youcouldmakealife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You thought you were in love with me,” Nikita says, and it’s not mocking, the way he says it, not derisive, just a statement of fact, a recollection, like he’d forgotten, like Luke would need to be reminded. Like it’s something in the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	burned out flames should never reignite

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry to anyone who's impatiently waiting for more Andy, I'm trying to finish this fast before I choke on it. This is the penultimate part, we're almost there, guys.
> 
> Title's from Daughter's "Home".

Of all the things that Luke could be caught for, it’s the fucking bar fight that makes the press. Someone got a picture, Luke on top of the guy, blood stark red on the guy’s face, and it looks bad. It looks fucking terrible.

His mom calls him to yell at him, Ben continues to ice him out, and management takes him aside, seems unimpressed with the argument that the guy hit him first, because half of Luke’s job is hitting, and the other half is knowing when to stop. He gets scratched a couple games, until they drop the story, and then he’s under pretty strict instructions to respond instead of incite, and that the only excuses they’ll accept for a fight are if someone fucked up a teammate, or if he can’t avoid it.

Of course they play Winnipeg in the aftermath. He was taken aside before the game, told that under no circumstances was he allowed to start a fight with Sidorchuk. The media’s been harping on whether an enforcer is still a thug off the ice, whether he can actually put it down, and they’ve taken his history of fights with Sidorchuk and harped on them endlessly, constantly speculating. The worst thing possible would be to fight him, Luke knows this, but if Sidorchuk hits him first, no one’s going to blame him for responding.

Except he doesn’t. Luke would think he got warned by his own management, but there’s no petulance on his face when Luke meets his eye, no anger either, and that just pisses Luke off more and more as the time goes out, Sidorchuk as implacable as he always was, as he was with Luke right until Luke proved that he could take him. He hasn’t looked at Luke like that in a long time, calm, even, with no temper at the edges.

Luke hates it. And he hates that he hates it, that it gets to him like this. They don’t fight, they don’t even get close, and when Luke’s showering after the game he considers just going home, since half of the fuck is about the fight anyway, but then, Sidorchuk knows where he lives. Considers going out to a bar and avoiding him entirely, but he’s on such a tight leash right now that management would probably choke him out over it, maybe scratch him a few more games, and Luke can’t take that, he was almost tearing himself apart under unspoken house arrest, couldn’t fit in his own skin. He’s got hockey, and he needs to keep having hockey, because without it he doesn’t know who the fuck he’s supposed to be.

So he waits in the usual place, half hoping that Sidorchuk won’t show and he can go home and choke on that, but Sidorchuk’s already there when Luke comes out, hair still wet, in his game day suit but lazy about it, the tie tucked away somewhere, the first few buttons of his shirt undone so that Luke can see the hollow of his throat. He’s gorgeous, and Luke hates that most about him, that he can still be punched in the face with how Sidorchuk looks, how desperately Luke continues to want him.

“Good fight,” Sidorchuk says, mouth quirking up.

“Just get in the fucking car,” Luke says, so tired.

*

After Nikita’s gone, they need a tough guy.

Luke’s angry all the time now, when he’s not cut down, will be laughing at a movie or in the middle of his English homework and then he’ll remember the way Nikita left, and his stomach will drop, it’ll be a toss up whether his eyes fill or his fists clench. Luke hasn’t cried since that night, hasn’t let himself, so instead he just lets himself be angry, and that works for him, because they need a tough guy, and Luke needs to know one day he could fight Nikita and win.

He’s still in love, he’s pretty sure, but it’s twisted, cancerous, so tangled up that he can’t tell anymore. Before that night, thinking about Nikita had been something bright, something he did with his hand down his boxers, or sometimes when he was drifting to sleep, bored in class, reflecting on the way the chain Nikita wore would sometimes leave a mark on Luke’s face if he fell asleep on his chest, the way his fingers felt, rough, cool, against Luke’s skin. And it’d light him right up.

Now he can’t think of Nikita without thinking of the way his face twisted, the amusement and the derision and the disgust. Can’t think of him without thinking of the knee in his gut, the way Nikita laughed at him, looks around his classes and wonders if any of these were the girls Nikita fucked, all of them so infatuated with how foreign he was, how different. 

He would stop thinking about Nikita if he could, and he tries, he does, but it’ll hit him at the stupidest times, even months later, someone will mention Brave New World and Luke will remember reading it shoulder to shoulder with Nikita on the bus before they’d ever touched, or a girl in class will flirt with him and he’ll wonder if she was one of them, let Nikita kiss her and get a hand up her shirt and then made him stop when he was sliding a hand under her skirt because she wasn’t like that, and Nikita went to Luke, who’d offer up anything if he asked. Had Luke suck him off while he remembered the way her nipple went tight and hard beneath his fingers, the way she sucked in a breath against his mouth.

Bets Nikita kissed them, because no girl would put out for someone who wouldn’t even kiss them. They had too much pride, Luke bets. And here Luke is, in love and fucked up with it. He let Nikita take him apart, and he doesn’t even know what it feels like to kiss him.

He gets good at fighting. He’s always been a physical player, bigger than a lot of guys his age, though they’re all catching up, and he can throw a good clean check that’ll leave someone dazed. But now he’s learning how not to be clean, stays back after practice and lets the assistant coach run through jabs with him, the best way to get a grip on your opponent. It’s harder than he thought it would be, he thought you could just grab someone and start whaling away on them. No wonder Nikita took him down so easy.

He gets a reputation, fast, scouts coming and meeting up with him after, telling him they like his grit, that if he puts on a few pounds he could really make something out of it, and he does, puts on the weight, tightens his form, finds he’s spending whole chunks of the game in the box. And he likes it, the anger in him sour and hot until he’s got his hand fisted in someone’s jersey, and he gets to let go of it, for a little while, sits in the box, the blood pumping through him, endorphins pumping through him, adrenaline, but instead of riled up, he feels calm. It carries him for awhile, and when it stops working, when the bile starts coming, then he finds someone else to hit, to hit him back.

When the draft comes, Calgary takes him in the second round, and he ignores the way his parents’ faces fall a little, doesn’t care that he grew up hating them, because he got drafted way above where Nikita did, and he didn’t realise that’s all he wanted until Calgary offered it to him. Doesn’t make it past training camp, the games for the baby Flames, but they stick him in Abbotsford, pay him a chunk of cash, so eventually he’s moving out of the place of the first guy to offer a spare room, and into his own place, which is basically just a mattress and a couch and a coffee table as far as furniture goes, but is his.

He only thinks about Nikita when he’s in bed, when all the distractions have disappeared and there’s nothing he can do to turn his mind away. Has started thinking about him the way he used to, the way the chain left indents, the way his hands felt, but there’s a bitterness overlaying all of it. It doesn’t stop Luke from missing him. It doesn’t stop Luke from wanting him there. Nikita gets called up a week before the Heat are due to play the baby Penguins, and Luke tells himself he isn’t disappointed. He wouldn’t want to see whatever Nikita’s expression would be, at least until Luke hit him hard enough to win. Then he’d probably savour it.

*

They don’t speak in the car. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, and when they do it’s barbed, sharp comments. Things that sting, though Sidorchuk hasn’t mentioned Red Deer since that time on the ice when Luke mocked Sidorchuk’s face and Sidorchuk pointed out that Luke had been gagging for his face, that Luke had been in _love_ with his face. That night Luke had gone back to the hotel with everyone else, his mouth tasting like bile. Sidorchuk hasn’t brought it up since.

But he breaks that unspoken agreement tonight, spends half the drive just watching Luke, frank, enough to make him uncomfortable, and then he says, “do you still think about Red Deer?”

“We’re not talking about this, Nikita,” Luke says, hands clenching on the steering wheel, the closest thing to violence he’s allowed.

“You thought you were in love with me,” Nikita says, and it’s not mocking, the way he says it, not derisive, just a statement of fact, a recollection, like he’d forgotten, like Luke would need to be reminded. Like it’s something in the past. 

I _was_ in love with you, Luke thinks, I’m _still_ in love with you. All he says is,“If you want, I can drop you off right fucking here.”

“Okay,” Nikita says, hands up, placating, like he’s fine with humouring Luke. In the past seven years, Luke’s said worse things to him than Nikita had said in that room, Nikita’s said worse things right back. They’ve torn each other apart, always marked with a bruise, a cut, Luke’s hip stinging from a bite, Nikita’s cheekbone needing to be reconstructed. He’s still got the surgery scars under his eye, you can see them if you’re looking. They’ve done worse, they’ve done so many things, and maybe Nikita doesn’t remember, because it wasn’t his heart that got broken. If he has a goddamned heart to break. 

The rest of the drive is made in silence, Luke’s hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, Nikita still looking at him, and when Luke parks, hands unmoving, eyes still front and centre, Nikita says, “Luke,” almost gentle.

“I can’t do this,” Luke says, flat. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Luke,” Nikita repeats, and when Luke finally makes himself look at him, Nikita leans forward and kisses him, soft, careful, like first kisses should be. Like the two of them have never been in their goddamned lives. The first time Luke touched Nikita he gagged on him, and that’s been true ever since, more or less.

Nikita pulls back, rests his forehead against Luke’s. Luke should pull away, Luke should get the fuck away, but he can’t, breath coming too fast, on the verge of hyperventilation.

“Come inside,” Nikita says, and when he speaks Luke can feel it, like back when he’d lay his head on Nikita’s chest and any sound Nikita made would fill his head. 

Nikita cups his cheek, kisses him again, and this one isn’t soft or careful, this one hurts. Not physically, for once neither of them are doing harm with every touch, but this is the way Luke used to dream of Nikita kissing him, hard, passionate, like he couldn’t bear not to be touching Luke, like he was overwhelmed by Luke as much as Luke was overwhelmed by him. And he’s still overwhelmed, gets a hand fisted in Nikita’s jacket but just uses it to hold on, to root himself, until Nikita pulls back, breathing harsh. Luke doesn’t think Nikita’s ever looked at him the way he is looking at him now.

“Come inside,” Nikita repeats, breathless, and this time Luke obeys.


End file.
